The Russian-German architect, Sergei Tchoban has won the Gold Medal in the First Athens Architecture Club Exhibition in Athens, Greece. Organized by The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, the Athens Architecture Club, resurrects the historical architecture clubs founded during the 19th-Century in the United States as an open forum, an infrastructural framework, and support platform for architects, artists and writers to discuss, challenge and enrich a dialogue among practitioners and scholars.
The exhibition opened in July and continues through August at Contemporary Space Athens (74, Mitropoleos Street, Plaka, Athens.)
For this first exhibition, select architectural practitioners from Europe, Asia, Australia, Canada, and the United States were invited to participate.
Participating architects include: Fritz Auer, Santiago Calatrava, Mark Cavagnero, Roger Christ, Michael Graves, Alessandro Guerrero, Christoph Hesse, Steven Holl, Arata Isozaki, Daniel Libeskind, John Marx, Alessandro Mendini, Adrian Smith, Edward Suzuki, Sergei Tchoban, Alec Tzannes, Murat Tabanlioglu, and James von Klemperer.
The scope of this exhibition at Contemporary Space Athens includes drawings and sketches of buildings in course of erection, models, projects in competition, travel sketches, portraits, watercolors, poetry, photography, video, which helps one to discover an appreciation for the purely pictorial feeling in Architecture and its surroundings.
“In Chicago in 1886,” states Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, Museum President, The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, “the first Architecture Club was founded in Chicago, and the clubs spread to cities across the United States well up into the 1920s.” “To this end, The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design felt it appropriate to resurrect this great tradition, but on a global scale and in the birthplace of Western Civilization—the actual and symbolic roots of Western Architecture—the City of Athens.”
“The principal objective of The Athens Architectural Club,’ “states Narkiewicz-Laine, “its raison d’être, is the advancement of Architecture, Art, and the Allied Arts.
And for this first exhibition, in the spirit of Louis H. Sullivan, the 19th-Century Chicago Architect and superior draftsman, who was also instrumental in the founding of the first Architecture Club, a jury selected Sergei Tchoban’s Dead-End 1 (from the series “Totalitarianism and Architecture”) as the Gold Medal Winner.
St. Petersburg-born Tchoban is the Managing Director of the German office Tchoban Voss Architekten in Berlin and the Russian office SPEECH in Moscow.
An accompanying catalogue for the exhibition was published by Metropolitan Arts Press, Ltd. The cost of the catalogue is €20 (plus shipping and handling) and is available by contacting Konstadina Geladaki at konstadina@europeanarch.eu.
Next year’s Athens Architecture Club Exhibition takes place again in Athens, July-August 2019. The 2019 exhibition is open to all international architects, artists, writers, and poets.
The deadline for submissions to the juried exhibition is March 1, 2019.
